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Senate and Clinton Still Stalled on Nuclear Waste Disposal

Seventeen years ago, Congress ordered the Energy Department to choose a place for permanent storage of the tons and tons of radioactive nuclear waste building up at reactors in 40 states.

But after spending $6 billion just to study the issue, the government is not much closer to establishing a permanent waste site, stymied by decades of machinations that have transcended party lines and led to some of the most audacious power plays in Washington.

Today, after grappling for years over the rules of waste disposal and the question of whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada is a suitable place for the waste site, Congress and the White House failed once again to come up with a compromise.

By a vote of 64 to 34, the Senate passed a bill that would begin setting the rules for turning Yucca Mountain, an arid spot 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, into a permanent disposal site by 2007, although several hurdles remain.

Senate Republicans, who sponsored the bill, fell shy of the 67 votes needed to override a veto after the second-ranking Democrat, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, persuaded many of his colleagues to oppose the bill.

''This process had absolutely nothing to do with science,'' said Senator Richard H. Bryan, a Nevada Democrat and former governor who was elected to the Senate in large part because of his vigorous opposition to nuclear waste sites at Yucca Mountain or anywhere else in Nevada.

''It reeked of politics, and it continues to this very day,'' Mr. Bryan said.

On that point, there is agreement from the bill's chief sponsor, Senator Frank H. Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who is the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

He accused the White House of failing to address a critical issue facing the nuclear-energy industry -- the growing stockpile of nuclear waste -- in an effort to placate Nevada lawmakers.

''The administration is opposed to addressing this on their watch,'' Mr. Murkowski said, zeroing in on Vice President Al Gore's presidential run and his ties to environmental groups. ''It's perfectly logical considering Gore and Clinton and the environmental pressure.''

For most politicians and lawmakers, small-town concerns drive the debate. ''Nobody wants the waste,'' Mr. Murkowski said. ''But you throw it up in the air and it has to come down somewhere.''

Scientists have been searching for a place to bury nuclear waste since 1954, when the Atomic Energy Act permitted commercial nuclear reactors to generate electricity. The federal government was made responsible for disposing spent nuclear fuel. Since then, nuclear waste has piled up in holding tanks at reactors nationwide.

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In 1978, President Carter vowed not to leave the waste in temporary storage sites for future generations to deal with. Congress got busy and in 1982 instructed the administration to start choosing a permanent site. That is when politicians started throwing sharp elbows.

In 1984, an election year, President Reagan assured voters in the Southeast that they did not need to worry about being selected as the location of a permanent waste site. The list narrowed to three states: Texas, Washington and Nevada. But Representative Jim Wright of Texas, former House speaker, shielded his home state, and Representative Thomas S. Foley of Washington, another former speaker, protected his state as well.

Nevada, a sparsely populated state that has only four members of Congress and is the test site for nuclear bomb blasts, drew the short straw. In 1987, Congress chose Yucca Mountain as the only prospective site.

Scientists have been studying the site ever since, and the government has spent $6 billion from a nuclear energy fund, collected from nuclear energy rate payers, for the research. The total fund is $15 billion. There is still no firm conclusion on whether the site is suitable, or how to make it suitable.

Lawmakers from Nevada say it is wrong to place all the nuclear waste in one site.

''No one contended that in the interest of science all the nuclear eggs should be in one basket,'' said Senator Bryan, who says Nevada became the choice because it had no political clout.

As an example of the political tweaking that goes on, just this week Senator Murkowski sought to get Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Republican of Colorado, on his side by adding clause that would have barred the waste from passing through Colorado. But the clause upset too many other senators, so it was struck from the bill.

The nuclear industry is warning that several of its plants will run out of storage space for nuclear waste in the next few years and that the problem is only getting worse.

''It's extremely easy to use scare tactics in order to oppose progress on this issue, because it's nuclear,'' said Ted Garrish, vice president of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Nuclear plants produce more than 22 tons of nuclear waste a year. Most environmental groups oppose moving the waste, saying that trucking it across the nation is too perilous, a contention the nuclear industry disputes.

But Nevadans tend to see it the same way as the environmentalists. ''It's a mobile Chernobyl,'' Mr. Bryan said.